Just made this little demo vid to test out a few ideas for the finale of Freckle, and also to pump up my new crew for our first production meeting friday. Crew?! That's right, thanks to the Scary Cow film-makers collective, I now have a minion of potential velcro co-creationizers!

"Rabbit Hole" was a test-edit for four shoots:

Piles O' Dots . I am starting to experiment with going off the grid, as it were. Just building mounds of dots. In the vid I just show a big green pile. Actually I shot a lot more, with multiple colors, but it didn't really look as killer as I had hoped. I think in the next iteration the key will be to light and shoot the pile from an angle to give it some dimension.

Dot suit hoe-down . We shot this a long time ago and I have been so excited to see how it would turn out. The concept is simple: purple screen background, green suits, and pink dots, allowing me to pull each element as a mask by color ("chroma-keying") . In reality it was actually a bit of nightmare. I'd say it took me 25 hours of finger-numbing roto-work to pull good masks for that 6 seconds of footage. On the plus side, I got through almost a third of Doris Kearns Goodwins A Team of Rivals on audiobook. In the end, though, I think it completely worked, and I will totally use this footage in "Freckle."

Baby's First Year. Okay here's the story: I got really high in my apartment one day and it suddenly dawned on me: why isn't my whole studio covered wall to wall in dots? This led to: even better, I could get circular picture frames of different sizes, create an imaginary grid across all my studio walls, and do some crazy stop motion moving the the frames like big dots around the walls. And then of course: Omigod I'll print out stills from the video, put them in the frames, and do some crazy meta stop-mo for the end of the video. So I jumped on my bike, trekked to every thrift store within a five mile radius of my house and bought a huge mess of picture frames. But the idea cracked in half when at the Goodwill on 23rd and International I found the "Baby's First Year" frame, with 12 little oval insets for each month of your sweet cherub's little life. And then...

Prez ... it cracked in half again the next day when after work I drove to Urban Ore and hit another insane find: A large coin-collecting book in which to place each of your 43 five dollar US President collectible coins (look closely at the dots in Amber's book, and you will see the names of each of our founding fathers...). The diameter of the little holes for the coins: 1.5", exactly the size of my dots. Some times the universe just hands you a gleaming heap of tater tots and you just have to smile and chow down.